


it's always darkest before the dawn

by punkchutzpah



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-03 00:33:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13329720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkchutzpah/pseuds/punkchutzpah
Summary: The nightmares never really went away. They just seemed to become muted with time, desaturated, muffled. Those first few months after the twins were born, after Helena had nearly died, after she had watched the life drain from PT Westmoreland’s broken left eye socket, after S had…It had been rough.A drabble on Sarah's nights following the fall of Neolution.





	it's always darkest before the dawn

The nightmares never really went away. They just seemed to become muted with time, desaturated, muffled. Those first few months after the twins were born, after Helena had nearly died, after she had watched the life drain from PT Westmoreland’s broken left eye socket, after S had…

It had been rough.

Sarah was used to being alone. Being alone was what being an orphan was; the rhythmic emptiness in the space between heartbeats, the vast nothingness of inky black between stars. She had been alone from the time she had left the womb; ripped from her sister, bouncing through the foster system, from family to family and house to house. An irrepressible dull ache she felt as clearly as the pulse beneath her skin. Being alone was familiar. And suddenly it was smothering her.

So Felix came to live with them the first couple of weeks. The lot of them camped out in S’s old bedroom at night, Sarah’s arms wrapped protectively around Kira in S’s rickety old queen, Felix sprawled out on the camp bed in the corner, a baseball bat propped up against the bedframe, a knife in reach on top of the night stand, and S’s shotgun loaded on top of the wardrobe (“Sarah’s trio of odd bedfellows”, Felix would comment dryly, usually followed by a swift swat to the shoulder). Some nights they abandoned the beds entirely, building giant nap nests in the living room with Kira, tangling up in each others’ limbs in the blankets, snuggled into the solid warmth of one another.

 

On Sarah’s really bad nights, Felix made tea and sat up with her on the couch downstairs, watching the few movies S had kept from their childhood on the ancient VHS player until the shaking and cold sweats had subsided, Kira safely tucked in upstairs. When Felix had had to go to New York for the weekend, Art came for dinner with Maya and Charlotte and was mysteriously unable to get his brand new police-issue Subaru to start.

“What can I say? Something must be wrong with the carburetor.”

Sarah had rolled her eyes, “Mmhm sure, you twat.”

but she had made up a bed for him on the couch and sent all the giggling girls up to Kira’s room with sleeping bags. And when she woke up at 1 am drenched in sweat, heart rattling against her ribs, her mind spiraling in on itself (Paul. Blood. Cosima. Cold, lifeless. S. Gone. Gone.) Art was waiting for her at the kitchen table, bent over a backlog of paperwork. He didn’t say anything when she appeared, pale and clammy in one of S’s old sweaters, just wordlessly moved the file folders off of the chair next to him.

“I swear I’m going to kick Felix right in the bollocks.” she muttered weakly from the doorway.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about Manning,” Art said evenly, not looking up from his report, “but I could use a hand with some of this transcribing.”

 

Sometimes, during those first few weeks, she found herself desperately wishing Helena and the twins lived with them. There was something soul-achingly healing about seeing her sister with her sons, to look down at her nephews and know that in those blue, wide eyes, Helena had never been the monster that those cruel, twisted people had forced into being. Besides, if there was any time in which having a skilled and trained assassin as a twin sister came in handy, it was when she was trembling in the hallway, haunted by visions of murderous demons wearing latex gloves and business suits. But Kira was a growing girl back at school full time and she needed her sleep; something little Arthur and Donnie had been depriving Helena of for weeks now.

“I feel like brood mare Sarah. All babies want is milk and much screaming.” her exhausted sister said gruffly during one of their many midnight Skype calls.

“I know,” Sarah said, unable to keep from grinning lopsidedly, “Nursing ‘em can be tough, hang in there.”

“I will hang, for my babies.”

“Good, I know you will meathead,”

“You know Helena, we could always switch to formula.” A bleary-eyed Alison stepped into frame, gently bouncing a screaming Arthur in her arms, “It would be more efficient and maybe your nipples would stop cracking.”

Sarah snorted into her tea.

 

On the third week, Kira squirmed out from Sarah's protective embrace and quietly asked to sleep in her own bed.

“Of course you can, babes,” Sarah said, eyebrows raised, “D’you need me to tuck you in?”

“M-oom,” She drew out, northern american accent through-and-through at this point, “I’m nine remember?”

“Ok, go on then,” Sarah smiled softly, nudging her gently, “No readin’ or anything like that, its bed time.”

She watched her scamper out of the room with a strange sense of emptiness.

 

Kira was damn brave. And if Sarah was being honest, she often wished that her little girl had chosen to stay in S’s bedroom with her for longer. The warmth of her little body, the comforting beat of her little heart gave her a rare bit of peace in this new world. Away from the bills, and groceries, and the crushing hole in her heart.

 

Sarah’s heart skipped guiltily at how secretly pleased she was whenever Kira did crawl back into her bed in the weeks that followed. An occurrence that was only preceded by sickness or sadness, or one particularly nasty nightmare that involved needles and a chemical fire.

“Mmm,” Sarah hummed contentedly as the bed dipped at her side in the dark, her arms instinctively reaching out for her daughter as Kira clambered into the bed sniffling.

“You’re alright Monkey, I got ya.” she murmured into Kira's dark hair, voice thick with sleep. She breathed in her clean smell; soap and vanilla, and something else distinct that Sarah had always associated with S.

Kira hiccuped softly, burrowing into the safe haven of Sarah's arms.

“…Mummy’s got you.”

 

Time passed by slowly. She was tending bar and taking GED classes at the local community center with a bunch of kids ten years her junior. Nearly burning the house down trying to make dinner, and then throwing up her hands and ordering pizza for the third time that week. She was exhausted all the time. She fell asleep everywhere; the couch, the back room of the bar, in the car waiting for Kira after school. The faint itch under her skin growing stronger everyday, telling her to take Kira and leave, to run, to stop being so goddamn still.

 

More and more nights she found herself thinking about Cal. His smell, the warm, roughness of him, the solidness of his chest, the scratch of his stubble. She deserved every last thing he had yelled at her that cold, dark morning in the little kitchenette in Iceland. How much hurt she had caused.

“Not everything is about YOU Sarah,” He had hissed sharply, trying to keep his voice low, the little girl in snowflake pajamas curled up in the other room. “Don’t you ever think, just ONCE about what you leave behind? You’re not in a vacuum for Christ’s sake! I loved - I would have loved -”

He had apologized, he always apologized. Apologized for shit she’d caused, things she’d done. Burning bridges, tearing down the fragile, beautiful things that other people seemed capable of making together. How could she have told him that he scared her shitless? That the idea that they could be happy felt a hell of a lot like when she had been slugged so hard in primary school that she couldn’t breathe properly for two hours? He had been easy to ignore when she was running all over bloody Toronto with a bot in her fucking jaw, her sister hacking her lungs out, seizing in a secret lab under a comic book store, her pre-pubescent daughter in danger of being harvested for her eggs.

But now,

she knew he was still out there, on damage control, keeping Project Leda out of the headlines, bribing, hacking, blackmailing the remaining Neolutionist pricks into silence from some Scandinavian-looking apartment in Sweden, probably looking even more like a bloody lumberjack.

Protecting them, always protecting them.

She still had the number, for his clean cell, the one he had left for Kira, crumpled up in the drawer of her nightstand, on the scrap of paper he’d tucked into her hand, kissing her on the forehead for the last time in the dim light of the kitchen. Maybe one day soon she would call him, tell him that she saw him every time her daughter laughed, the skin around her eyes crinkling with happiness, or when she tucked her in at night, lightly tracing his freckles on Kira’s face, criss-crossing the bridge of her nose like little constellations. That he was who came swimming to the surface of her conscience on the rare night she woke up flushed and breathless, her hand shoved down the front of her sleep shorts, a familiar ache warming low in her belly. That she hadn't washed his big woolly jumper for over two months after he left for Stockholm, because it smelled like pine needles and tree sap and him. That sometimes her heart swelled in her chest when she watched Kira bent over her math homework at the kitchen table, and knew that she was theirs, that even if he could never truly forgive her, even if she could never truly stop running, they were forever entwined in the spirals of this little girl’s DNA.

Maybe she would call.

Maybe tomorrow.

For now, she would take it each night at a time. Wait for it all to fade, to mute, the jagged edges of the wounds to knit together in pink uneven tissue in the vast, terrifying space behind her closed eyelids. For her to realize that all those things were dreams now, memories, things that would never go away but never truly come back either. That there was something better out there now, in the brightness of the dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> this was my attempt at writing something a bit more abstract. I struggled a bit with the verb tenses and the way I wanted it to sound. hope it was alright! I really miss this show, it had such awesome characters.  
> Anyway, thanks for reading, let me know what you think!


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